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Gosh, I don't know... I just really didn't dig this film apart from the creature and ship design.
Depp's performance seemed more pantomimic than in the previous film, or perhaps was just more of the same and therefore seemed more ho-hum ~ tiptoe walking, hands out daintily, coupled with rummy wobblings; cowardly manoeuverings and selfishness as his only real motivation, making his behaviour as well as his performance pretty predictable throughout. Maybe it's inevitable that by faithfully continuing the same persona that seemed startling and charismatic in "Black Pearl", Depp as Jack would lose edge, novelty, and for me, a lot of interest, but he seemed very one-note. His change of heart when returning to the Pearl to shoot the Kraken was signalled as a deepening of his character, but as far as I could see, he didn't rescue the situation at all ~ Elizabeth was about to shoot, when Jack actually slowed things down by placing his foot on the rifle and insisting on doing it himself. Did he save the day at all, and did his return make any difference to their fate?
Only his last moments, ironically, made me consider him in a new light as noble, heroic, glam, dandy and a bit tragic, rather than Russell Brand as Captain Hook.
The other two leads, and Davenport as the third lead of sorts, were, I felt, an awful combination of pretty looks and utterly plain performance. In fact, more than plain ~ they were half-dead. They were undead. They were pretty corpses. Swann and Turner are just dead-weight anchors on this franchise for me. They kill it, ironically, whereas the villains and anti-hero always liven it up.
Further: plot. While I relished the first film as tight, this seemed all slack and loose ends. I'm one of those who didn't realise that was BTTF:II, a chapter rather than a self-contained film or even, really, an episode working in its own right ~ none of it seemed to tie up at all. I felt more closure at the end of last night's "Lost".
Finally: the action seemed very overblown and cartoonish here. I can't remember quite if this was the case in "Black Pearl", but the waterwheel swordfight, for instance, while impressive in terms of stunts and/or CGI, seemed over-the-top to the point of being ridiculous. It might seem silly to complain about realism in a series with skeleton pirates and men made of the sea-bed, but of course a film can have its own internal logic even if it involves supernatural elements, and I felt that the laws of physics were entering Tom and Jerry territory in most of the action sequences ~ which stripped it of any sense of risk, dread, danger and excitement for me.
The saddest thing is that I don't much feel like watching "Black Pearl" again now, in case I realise with hindsight that it was along the same lines as this largely yawnsome hokum. |
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